The Source in Denver: An artisan food market occupying a former 1880's brick foundry building in the River North District.

Welcome to Out of the Kitchen, our ongoing exploration of the relationships that build and sustain the food industry. This year, we’re traveling the country to look at the changing landscape of food markets. Hyper-local markets—filled with myriad grocery, retail, and restaurant options like the ones found in Europe—are on the rise. These markets benefit from their interconnected buying power but operate like small, independent businesses, allowing them to focus on quality ingredients, culinary innovation, and intimate, personal customer service. Through quality, personal touches, and exceptional product, these new food halls are revolutionizing retail one transaction at a time.

Most people have to accept the food markets that come with their neighborhood. Kyle and Andra Zeppelin got to create the food market they wanted for their neighborhood.

The couple have lived in what's called the River North, or RiNo, District of Denver since 2007. In 2000, the Zeppelin family business had begun developing residential buildings on the site of a onetime taxicab garage in the industrial neighborhood. At that point, the area was known more as the blighted scrapyard of the city than a place anyone would remotely want to live.

Brad Torchia

Photo: Brad Torchia

"It basically was a neighborhood that wasn't even on the map for the rest of Denver or for native Denverites as more than a back way to get into the city," Kyle says.

Now it's the burgeoning epicenter of the city's creative and tech scene. The city is on board for a massive renovation of the streetscape that will put in sidewalks, bike lanes, bridges, and even a nearby transit stop, and developers including the Zeppelins are laying down the foundations for some 6,000 residential units. The Zeppelins are putting in a 100-key hotel with a rooftop beer garden, as well.

"We're not trying to live the American Dream and move out to the suburbs," Andra (who is the editor of Eater Denver) says. "We wanted a really functional space. We love the idea of talking across the plaza to work in the morning so there is no commute. We love the idea that our kids come home from school by walking through the office."

Brad Torchia

Photo: Brad Torchia

With sizable residential and office space in the neighborhood, the next logical step was to create a retail space that would offer high-end goods to meet the needs not just of the people who worked and lived there, but for folks from all over the city. Right across the narrow Platte River from the Zeppelins' pioneering mixed-use complex—now called Taxi—was a 25,000-square-foot space that was going to waste. It had most recently been used as a warehouse for an industrial supply company. Behind it ran the tracks for a freight railroad. It had none of the essentials for even a basic retail space. Another developer had flirted with the idea of turning it into a parking structure. But Kyle had other ideas.

"A project is only as good as the urban environment around it," Kyle says. "No one knew how to use this big open space. When we walked into the doors back in 2010, there was nothing going on—no sidewalks, no infrastructure, no utilities. But what there was this beautiful shell without layers of bad renovations."

The previous owners had left a shell replete with graffiti and tumbling bricks, but high, peaked ceilings, lots of space, and sunlight streaming through skylights to the north. The Zeppelins kept all that—even the graffiti—and overlaid with stainless-steel studs and skeletal design sense that showed off the raw, original look of the place.

Brad Torchia

Photo: Brad Torchia

"We're not trying to 'vintage it out,'" Kyle says. "We're trying to be honest about what's old and what's new."

Then they filled it with 14 or 15 of the kind of vendors who made up the kind of market that they, as a family, had dreamt of going grocery shopping in every weekend. Kyle and Andra had already known many of their tenants—as regular customers at other locations.

"What you don't want is a mall with restaurants," Kyle says. "We try to fill in most of it with market uses, market functions that are a draw in their own right, adding to the flow while benefiting from the activity around them. It's a classic format for a market, but we think we have a newer take on it, using this funky used-up industrial building. We have a diversity of uses that aren't completely overlapping. from the meat counter to the bakery to the coffee place with the huge 1930s German roaster."

And critically for the Zeppelins, it became a place where consumers could reconnect with where their food came from—"the makers' culture that's indigenous to the area," as Kyle puts it. The Source is all about the source of customers' food.

Brad Torchia

Photo: Brad Torchia

"In the butcher shop, you have your cooler right here facing the market, so even if you're in the common area, that becomes a part of the experience," Kyle. "It's not what people are used to seeing anymore, but it's a signature of the project."

"We'd worked so hard to make ourselves about making soil to steak," says Kate Kavanaugh, co-founder of Western Daughters, the market's butcher shop. "What this does is take this produce that's reached the city—coffee, cheese, flowers, flour—and show how it gets to your plate, uncover the process of roasting coffee beans or baking bread. Before The Source, you had people here who never knew that coffee was roasted."

"They read 'dark roasted' on the bag, but didn't know what it meant," says her partner, Josh Curtiss.

"They saw packaged meat in the bin in the grocery store, but they had no idea where it came from," Kavanaugh says.

On one spring day, one side of the market was filled to overflowing with beer lovers—the Crooked Stave brewery was releasing a new bottle of sour beer. Some of the overflow crowd inspected bottles carefully in The Proper Pour, which often gets nationwide raves for its curated selection of liquors and wines. Others scanned cheese and cured meats at Mondo Market, next door, an online shop venturing into the realm of the brick-and-mortar. Out front, the anchor restaurants—Acorn (New American) and Comida (Mexican) were revving up for the dinner crowd. Across from Mondo, a customer or two was popping into Western Daughters to figure out what kind of steak or chop to cook up for dinner. Eventually, a pedestrian bridge will connect the market to the new hotel and its beer garden.

"We had to go back two or three generations to create this traditional concept of a community space that's relevant to where the world is now," Kyle says. "By violating the status quo in this neighborhood, we created activity where there wasn't any before. There's a lot of gratification there."